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Darwin is the capital of the Northern Territory, and is a city of 109,419 people (2001 census) on Australia's far north-western coastline. Darwin is reputed to suffer more lightning-strikes than any other inhabited place in the world. It is also home to the Territory's only university, Charles Darwin University.

Melbourne was the only city in the Southern Hemisphere in which the Three Tenors (Luciano Pavarotti, Plácido Domingo and José Carreras) performed on their world tour in 1997, and the only city in the world to host the Kiss Symphony, a combined performance of the rock band KISS and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in 2003.

The Australian Constitution guarantees the separation of church and state; there is no state religion in Australia. Although the nation is broadly secular and few are church-goers, three-quarters of Australians are nominally Christian, mostly Catholic or Anglican. A diverse range of other religions are practised.

To the visitor from the northern hemisphere, many of Australia's birds will immediately seem familiar - Australian wrens look and act very like northern hemisphere wrens, Australian robins seem to be close relatives of the northern hemisphere robins - but in fact the majority of Australian passerine birds are descended from the ancestors of the crow family, and the close resemblance is misleading: the cause is not genetic relatedness but convergent evolution.

The 1980s is regarded as perhaps a golden age of Australian cinema, with many wildly successful films, from the dark science fiction of Mad Max to the blatantly commercial Aussie-bloke fantasy of Crocodile Dundee, a film that defined Australia in the eyes of many foreigners despite having remarkably little to do with the lifestyle of most Australians. The indigenous film industry continues to produce a reasonable number of films each year, also many US producers have moved productions to Australian studios as they discover a pool of professional talent well below US costs. Notable productions include The Matrix and the Star Wars episodes II and III.

Australia's neighbouring countries include New Zealand to the southeast and Indonesia, East Timor, and Papua New Guinea to the north. The shortest border distance is between the mainlands of Papua New Guinea and Australia at about 150 km; however, the nearest inhabited island, Boigu Island, is about 5km from Papua New Guinea. This has led to a complicated border arrangement allowing access for 'traditional' uses of the waterway across the border by Papua New Guinean people and Torres Strait Islanders.

With a population of approx. 170,000 people in the city proper (known as the "city of Sydney") and a metropolitan area population exceeding 4 million, the Sydney metropolis is the larger of the two main financial, transport, trade and cultural centres of Australia (the other being Melbourne, Sydney's long term rival to the title of pre-eminent Australian city).

Rainfall in Australia is highly variable, with frequent droughts lasting several seasons. Occasionally a duststorm will blanket a region or even several states and there are reports of the occasional large tornado. Rising levels of salinity and desertification in some areas is ravaging the landscape.